Killer Crab Cakes Read Free

down over her short graying brown hair.
    She went downstairs, figuring that she would avoid the kitchen and wait for Sam out on the porch. As she went through the living room she looked through the arched opening that led into the dining room and saw that several people were already sitting at the long mahogany table. She thought she ought to at least speak to them, so she stepped into the dining room to say good morning.
    Bed-and-breakfasts were popular with couples, and there were three of them at the table this morning. With the ease that came from years and years of learning the names of the children in her classes, Phyllis already knew all of them. Nick and Kate Thompson were the youngest guests, in their mid-twenties and married less than a year. The other two couples, Leo and Jessica Blaine and Sheldon and Raquel Forrest, were in their forties, with an ease around one another that showed they were longtime friends. From what Phyllis had heard, they had been coming here for a couple of weeks every autumn for more than a decade.
    Phyllis chatted briefly with them. Stocky, redheaded Leo Blaine grinned and said, “You look like you’re going fishing, Mrs. Newsom.”
    “That’s right. I’m going to watch my friend Sam fish, anyway. I’m afraid I wouldn’t know what to do if I actually hooked a fish.”
    “You’d figure it out,” Sheldon Forrest said. He was tall and somewhat gawky, unlike Sam, who moved with a certain grace despite his size. “Fishing is an instinct. Mankind has been doing it for thousands of years.”
    “Maybe so,” Phyllis said, “but I haven’t.”
    She went out onto the porch and found that Sam was already there. He had the same sort of equipment that Ed McKenna had been carrying earlier, plus a big plastic bucket. “For that big red drum I’m gonna catch,” he explained.
    “You’re a man with confidence.”
    “Might as well be. Otherwise you’re halfway to being beat before you start.”
    There were a few clouds along the horizon, but the sun was well above them by now. The air was starting to get warm. A slight breeze blew, but not enough to disturb the water much. It rose and fell some, but only with the natural rhythm of the sea.
    “Is this good fishing weather?” Phyllis asked as they started out along the pier. It had a railing on the right side and a shorter wall on the left where people could sit to fish if they wanted to. Phyllis wasn’t crazy about piers, especially the ones where the planks had gaps between them where the water was visible. The Oak Knoll private pier was sturdy and well built, though, so she wasn’t particularly nervous.
    “Any weather is good fishin’ weather if you don’t care that much about catching keepers,” Sam replied.
    “You don’t want to keep what you catch?”
    “Only if it’s something really good, like that red I mentioned. Otherwise I’d rather just reel ’em in, take ’em off the hook, and throw ’em back. As far as I’m concerned, the fun’s in the catchin’, not in the cleanin’ and cookin’. In the eyes of some people, that would disqualify me from bein’ a real fisherman . . . but I don’t particularly care.”
    Phyllis thought that was a very sensible attitude. She had cleaned fish before. She didn’t care for it.
    “There’s Mr. McKenna,” she said, nodding to the hunched figure of Ed McKenna, who sat on the wall to the left side of the pier about five hundred feet offshore. That was approximately halfway out.
    “We’ll go on past him,” Sam said. “You don’t want to crowd another fisherman.”
    That sounded reasonable to Phyllis. “Should we be as quiet as possible?”
    “No, that’s not necessary. You don’t want to go hollerin’ and scarin’ off the fish, but it’s all right to say howdy and ask how they’re bitin’.”
    “You must’ve fished a lot.” Phyllis had known Sam for more than a year, ever since he had moved into the house as a boarder the summer of the Peach Festival murder,